You Want Me To Do What?

So you think you make up your own mind, right? Well, to round out this series of blogs on human behavior (my own little experiment), here is a link to ten of the most revealing studies in the field.

From social identity to risk assessment, humans behave in predictable fashion, while thinking that they are making their own decisions. Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson discovered much of this when they worked for PsyOps during WWII. Their observations became the basis of modern advertising, a field I know well.

My favorite? The first, the Robbers Cave Experiment, conducted the year I was born.

Doesn't it just make you want to (ring bell now) salivate?

The Ten Most Revealing Psych Experiments

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Here's an interesting vid I found on YouTube. I am familiar with the experiment and know it to be true, but I wonder how long it takes humanity to overcome the social inertia that keeps us from change, since at various times, we have.

Water, Power

Two very interesting items have popped up on my radar screen in the past few days.

First, Bobble, is a reusable, $10 water bottle with a carbon filter that is made in the US from recycled plastic, is BPA free, FDA approved and will filter out all the toxic crap in 300 gallons of tap water, while leaving in the minerals. That sure beats $1 per 16 oz. for bottled water from the store.

Second, my good friend Andrew Padula, got me onto this new tech that, while being rumored to be forthcoming over this last couple of years, has finally been unveiled (on 60 Minutes, no less).

The Bloom Box is a new fuel cell technology that promises to deliver low cost, clean electricity from common ingredients. Although in it's final testing stages, Bloom Box energy servers are being used at Bank of America, Google, Ebay, Walmart and FedEx (among others) and have the endorsement of luminaries such as Colin Powell, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Diane Feinstein and Michael Bloomberg. I suggest that you go to the website to learn more and then begin to salivate for the IPO. If you'd like to watch the 60 Minutes story on Bloom Energy, I've included it below.

Do we live in a great country or what?


Watch CBS News Videos Online

You See What Ya' Wanna' See And You Hear What Ya' Wanna' Hear

New research just in!  People pay no attention to facts that challenge their preconceived ideas.  That's a ground shaker isn't it?

The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale has made this discovery.  It basically boils down to this.  Give people access to the facts about any issue and they then filter them through their cultural belief system, basically picking and choosing the facts they will accept to bolster their own belief system.

Give rugged individualists facts about climate change and tell them that the solution to global warming is to regulate industrial pollution and many then reject the climate science. But when you tell them that more nuclear power will fix the problem, says social scientist and lawyer Don Braman, "they said, you know, it turns out global warming is a serious problem. It doesn't matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe, and they glom onto the positive information," Braman says.

The same can be said for the second group called "communitarians."  When given the same information about climate change, they say that industry needs to be regulated.  When told that nuclear power can help, they reject that.

Braman adds, "These two groups start to polarize as soon as you start to describe some of the potential benefits and harms."

"Basically the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values," says Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale University and a member of The Cultural Cognition Project.

From vaccines to nanotechnology to climate change to gay parenting to whatever, we have our minds made up going in and nothing's going to change them, especially nothing as relevant as pesky little facts.

Here's a link to an article in Nature that delves a little deeper into this troubling situation.

One More Food Tidbit

I forgot one other seed source that I really like: The Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Mineral, Virginia.

As they write on their website; "Southern Exposure Seed Exchange is a wonderful source for heirloom seeds and other open-pollinated (non-hybrid) seeds seeds with an emphasis on vegetables, flowers, and herbs that grow well in the Mid-Atlantic region. We support seed saving and traditional seed breeding. Seed savers and breeders are to thank for our rich selection and we will do whatever we can to support our customers and associates to carry on this noble tradition." I hope you support them, also.

Grow your own, eat well.

Food Rules

To round out this food thread, I'd like to recommend a wonderful, very brief book by Michael Pollan called "Food Rules: An Eater's Manual." Michael has written several books about food and the consequences of our food choices.  This book states three main rules and 64 sub-rules about eating and food.

The rules are clear and simple ideas about eating in healthy ways, such as: "don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" and "regard nontraditional foods with skepticism" and "eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored."

If you want to change the way you eat, the (un)common sense contained in its pages will help.

As Pollan writes, "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much."

Michael Pollan's Website
Purchase Food Rules on Amazon

Food Does Not Come From A Store. Part Two: Meat

Let's pose a simple question: what kind of meat would you like to be eating? Would you prefer meat from animals that have been raised in cramped pens and boxes, fed hormones to make them grow faster, given antibiotics to prevent the spread of infectious disease? Or would you rather eat meat from animals that were raised like they were a hundred years ago, as in free-range and fed clean feeds (grass, grain, the things that they ate for thousands of years previously)?

If you don't mind the first, you're in luck. About 85% of the meat that you get to chose from comes from non-organic, non free-range raised, sources. If you prefer the latter, your choices are much smaller and the meats more expensive.

Take hamburger. Most of the commercially available burger is laced with the "pink slime." Never heard of it? I'm not surprised. The "pink slime" is fatty slaughterhouse trimmings treated to remove the fat. Ammonia is added to retard spoilage and turned into a mashlike substance frozen into blocks or chips. This is then added to hamburger to increase profits. The U.S.D.A. also allows the ammonia to be listed as "a processing agent" instead of by name. And they also okayed the processing method and later exempted the hamburger from routine testing, strictly based on the company's claims of safety, which were not backed by any independent testing.

And to emphasize: this pink slime isn't just in fast food burgers or free lunches for poor kids. This processed beef has become a mainstay in America's hamburgers. McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

This saves three cents a pound off production costs.

How about poultry? The birds are given feed laced, again, with hormones and antibiotics, kept in small confined spaces and most are debeaked to reduce the feather pecking that can occur in birds when they are unable to go about their normal bird behaviors of foraging, dustbathing, and wandering about. This causes the birds stress and pain and produces related hormones that then go into the meat and eggs of the animal. This is what goes into you when you consume them.

And you don't get many companies to choose from when you consume poultry products. As an example, Cargill, is one of the world's largest poultry producers. All of the eggs used in McDonald's restaurants in the United States pass through Cargill's plants.

Although some grocers have begun to stock organically raised meats and eggs, many are reluctant to carry products that fewer consumers purchase, are more expensive and that often have a shorter shelf life. Over the past few years, this has begun to change.

Wegmans, a large mega-store chain, has organically raised beef, chicken and eggs. Most other large chains at least carry organic free range chicken eggs. But how do you go to the next step, insuring that the meats and eggs you buy come from farms whose practices are clean and healthy?

Buy local, that's how.

Below are links for just a few sources for organic free range meats and eggs in Virginia. Also included is a link to Buy Fresh, Buy Local. If you do a little research, you can find sources for almost anything you'd like. Healthy eating.

The Home Farm Store in Middleburg, Va, carries many organic and free range products.
Ayrshire Farm has heirloom free range meat and eggs.
Hollin Farms has beef and pork in Delaplane, VA.
Eatwild is a site with info on grass-fed meats.
Buy Fresh, Buy Local has listings for most of Virginia.

Next: a simple, short book about eating well.

Food Does Not Come From A Store. Part One: Seeds

The loss of genetic seed diversity facing us today may lead to a catastrophe far beyond our imagining. 100 years ago we planted over 150 different food crop species, now we are down to about two dozen. As just one example, of the over 10,000 varieties of apples, but we only utilize about ten now.

The Irish potato famine, which led to the death or displacement of two and a half million people in the 1840s, is an example of what can happen when farmers rely on only a few plant species as crop cornerstones.

Here are some more worrying facts about the food we have available to us.

One kind of seed, called First generation hybrids (F1 hybrids), have been hand-pollinated, and are patented, often sterile, genetically identical within food types, and sold from multinational seed companies. From thousands of seed companies and public breeding institutions three decades ago, 10 companies now control more than two-thirds of global proprietary seed sales. The proprietary seed market (that is, brand-name seed subject to exclusive monopoly – i.e., intellectual property), now accounts for 82% of the commercial seed market worldwide.

A second kind of seed is the genetically engineered seed (also know as a GMO - genetically modified organism). GMO seeds are fast contaminating the global seed supply on a wholesale level, and threatening the purity of seeds everywhere. The DNA of the plant has been changed. A cold water fish gene could be spliced into a tomato to make the plant more resistant to frost, for example. And we wonder why grocery store tomatoes don't taste all that good. Also, recent research has shown that GMO corn is linked to kidney and liver disease in test animals. If you are eating ANY processed corn product (corn chips, foods with corn syrup, etc.) you are eating GMO corn.

Do you want to do something about this? Let's start with seeds. Grow your own. Here's where and how.

Bioneers is a nonprofit educational organization that works to restore the biological diversity of our world.
Beauty Beyond Belief has heirloom vegetable seeds. Beautiful wildflower seeds, too.
Appalachian Seeds has heirloom tomatoes and seeds.
Seed Savers Exchange is a good place to start if you want to "grow your own."
Seeds Of Change pretty much started the organic, heirloom seed business.

Next time: Meat, buying locally (and not at the grocery store).

More Pictures of Landscapes and Food

I'm going to be writing about food for the next few entries and I thought I'd start with something uplifting.

World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, is part of a global effort to link volunteers with organic farmers, promote an educational exchange, and build a community conscious of ecological farming practices.

Portland, Oregon photographer, Jake Stangel, wanted to leave his urban home, ditch his tech and do something real. So he contacted WWOOF (as it's more commonly known) and the organization connected him with a couple who operate an organic farm in Central Florida, where he spent two weeks learning how to work with his hands. "I got to work with a handful of other people — to use my hands and power tools — on this beautiful farm in the middle of nowhere."

Although he left his computer at home, he did bring his camera and the link below shows you some of the results.

Jake Stangel's Florida Farming

New Augmented Reality Mapping from Microsoft

In this February 13th, 2010 TED talk, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrates new augmented-reality mapping from Microsoft. This technology integrates Photosynth, shown in the previous blog entry, into the mapping technology already available on Bing Maps and the walk around that you'll see of the Udvar Hazy Air and Space Center at Dulles Airport, by clicking on the link in this sentence, is pretty impressive. I was certainly impressed. Once you get to the map click on the "picture frame" to the left of the screen next the weather conditions in Chantilly.

Then watch the video below.